Alice C. Parker received B.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from North Carolina State University and an M.S.E.E. from Stanford University. Dr. Parker is a Professor Emerita and former Dean's Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She has been involved in digital system synthesis research since 1975. Her current research activities are developing electronic neural circuits using nanotechnology models of circuit elements, the preliminary steps necessary to construct a synthetic brain. She and her colleagues produced a synapse containing a carbon nanotube transistor. She has been honored with an NSF Faculty Award for Women Scientists and Engineers. Dr. Parker is a winner of a Viterbi teaching award, an award from South Central Scholars in appreciation of her work in mentoring talented but underrepresented college- bound scholars in the USC University Park neighborhood, an IEEE-USA Award for distinguished Literary Contributions and a mentoring award given by ASEE.

Rick Cattell was most recently an independent consultant in database systems. He previously worked as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, most recently on open source database systems and distributed database scaling. Dr. Cattell was best known for his contributions in database and server software, including database scalability, enterprise Java, object/relational mapping, object-oriented databases, and database interfaces. He is the author of several dozen papers, five books, and eight U.S. patents. At Sun, he instigated the Enterprise Java, Java DB, and Java Blend projects, and was a contributor to a number of Java APIs and products. He previously developed the Cedar DBMS at Xerox PARC, the Sun Simplify database GUI, and SunSoft's CORBA-database integration. He was a co-founder of SQL Access (a predecessor to ODBC), the founder and chair of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG), the co-creator of JDBC, the author of the world's first book on object/relational and object databases, a recipient of the ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award, and an ACM Fellow.